Wed, 21 Feb 2007
Orange Juice?
From time to time I will talk to someone who is feeling a little sick or
has a cold or is beginning to get the flu. Sometimes I will ask them
if they take vitamin C. The most common response that I get is, "I
drink lots of orange juice." The implication being that you will get lots
of vitamin C by drinking orange juice. Looking at the
Minute Maid web
site, I was surprised to see that most of their orange juice products
are listed as containing over 100% RDA of vitamin C. One of them even has
160% which would seem to be quite a bit. At least I must commend them
for putting in an amount that is well over the RDA. I suppose this might
be a tacit acknowledgment that just meeting the RDA is not necessarily
optimum. However, the FDA has still not made any changes to this
RDA in the last several years. It is still sitting at 60 mg per day as
far as I know.
Let's assume that a person gets sick and drinks around 5 glasses of the Country Style orange juice which contains 160% the RDA of vitamin C. If I am doing the math right, that would be 480 mg. Not quite half a gram. If you have been following my blog, you understand that it is not uncommon for me to use 40 to 50 grams in a day if I start to get sick. Linus Pauling suggested that a person should take a gram of vitamin C every hour at the first sign of a cold or flu. Increase this amount if no change for the better is observed. So you can see that if you are sick with a cold or flu, drinking a lot of OJ is not really going to cut it.
[/health/vitamin_c] 7 comments permalink
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